Welcome!
We are a group of people from all walks of life attempting to follow Jesus. We recognize following Jesus is a 24/7 commitment, done in God’s power, with the support of intimate relationships [community]. It has incredible implications on how we do life with our families, at work and among friends. We invite you to join us on this journey. You don’t have to have everything figured out, you just need a willingness to learn more about Jesus and what it means to participate in His mission.
MISSION
Changing the world one person at a time in the midst of intentional community.
VISION
Jesus once said, “Go and make disciples.”
Ghandi once said, “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”
We want to see a Vineyard church in the South Loop neighborhood of Chicago where our Christians look more and more like our Christ. We are a community of disciples who make disciples as we go about our lives.
Vineyard South Loop is a center-set community of Jesus’ followers who do the things Jesus did. Jesus’ agenda in Luke 4: 18-19 is our agenda. We continually seek to be “anointed by the spirit,” “to preach good news to the poor,” “to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind,” “to release the oppressed” and “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” within the context of our daily lives and in the context of our community life.
We agree with David Platt and believe, “Extraordinary things happen when ordinary disciples start making disciples.” We are ordinary people expecting the extraordinary, one person at a time.
We’re a South Loop, Chicago based church. We focus on serving and loving the South Loop of Chicago. We love to help the South Loop become a closer knit community of respect, activism and prayer.
Brandon and Amanda Neely tell the story of how the ideas for Vineyard South Loop began in this video.
Vineyard South Loop is part of the larger Vineyard movement and is a church plant of the Evanston Vineyard. To read a history of the Vineyard, click here.
VALUES
We value discipleship! We have 3 main values for making disciples.
(1) Relationship with God – Our personal and corporate relationships with God impact all of our other relationships. We value God as our loving Father, who wants to share his compassion and mercy on us. Through chatting with our Papa and interacting with His Word, we develop an intimate relationship that transforms our lives. Sub-values include:
· Prayer
· Scripture
· Worship
(2) Missional Community – Community does not exist just for itself. Community should be incarnational and gathered for the purpose of changing the world. We don’t work through a structure so much as through a living body. The church is not an organization but a troupe of people who lay down their lives for each other and their neighbors. Sub-values include:
· Contending for the Kingdom of God
· Contextualization
· Justice
(3) Spiritual Formation – People are transformed from the inside out as they move closer and closer to being like Jesus. Spiritual formation happens in individuals’ closets, in smaller groups of people, and in larger gatherings. We want people to live lives with a balance of factors, including nutrition, rest, reproduction, and growth. Sub-values include:
· The Individual
· Integrated and Purposeful Living
· Witness
A helpful image to see these values work together is an airplane. If discipleship is our plane, relationship with God is the body and missional community and spiritual formation are the wings. We see discipleship take flight with the help of the Holy Spirit as our wind. This image also highlights that discipleship is the journey not the destination. Jesus is the destination.
